The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  “It starts as a juvenile with auto theft, graduates two years ago with attempted murder. It seems the old man’s money has been able to keep him out of the slammer thus far. Though that may not work much longer if what we hear is true, that there’s a falling-out between father and sons.”

  “Any narcotics?” I ask.

  “Eight years ago,” says Adam. “Let’s see.” He licks his thumb and turns a page. “Here it is. Both of the sons were arrested. It was dismissed for lack of evidence. Federal Judicial Police believed they were into cocaine, growing it out in the jungles down in the area we’re going to today.”

  “Anything in the states?”

  He looks, peruses the record in the file for several seconds, and turns some pages. “Doesn’t look like it. There is a credit report. It shows they have bank accounts in several foreign countries, Belize and the Caymans, nothing huge, but continuous activity.”

  “So they’re making money doing something,” I say.

  “It would appear,” says Adam. “They applied for a loan about four months ago, listed assets including the last major deposit. That was about eight months ago, just shy of three hundred thousand dollars, U.S. So they’ve got something going.” Adam takes a deep breath, closes the file, and we settle in for the ride.

  An hour on and we see large signs along the road for something called Xcaret. Julio explains that this is a water theme park built around Mayan ruins. Families come for the day. For a fee they can swim in the natural lagoon or play in the artificial waterways constructed by the developers with the blessings of the government.

  The Mayan Riviera has its moments, incredible natural beauty and undisturbed jungle, with pockets of tourist wealth. We pass a number of these. Most of the resorts are closed off behind iron gates, with armed guards in kiosks out in front.

  From what I can see, the tourists who stay in the resorts pass along the road in air-conditioned comfort, only coming and going.

  Real life is out here. Traveling at seventy miles an hour, we come upon periodic migrations along the shoulder of the highway. Groups of men walking along the road dressed in shirts and jeans four sizes too large for them.

  “There must be a town,” I tell Julio.

  “Ah, villages. All over,” he says, “in the jungle.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “They look for work,” he says.

  Every few miles there’s another band, trudging along the sandy roadside in cast-off athletic shoes, some of them trailing wives and children, little kids, scrubbed and carried by their mothers, with their older brothers and sisters walking along in the dust. Like their parents, looking for a way to feed themselves for another day. I cannot help but think of Sarah at home, and what she would think, looking at kids her age unable to go to school, having to scratch the soil to eat.

  Adam leans over and says: “Even for this, the natural forces of the economy have an answer.” I begin to think he can read my mind.

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s why it didn’t make any sense that the Ibarras would be talking to Metz, trying to bring heavy equipment down here. There’s your answer.” He points off in the distance, a mile or so ahead, a bald part of the landscape where something has hacked away at the jungle. As we draw closer I recognize it: a construction site.

  “That’s where they’re all going,” he says.

  The place looks like an Egyptian tomb-building scene out of the The Ten Commandments. A vast anthill of men, too many to count, wielding shovels and pushing wheelbarrows, not a single piece of heavy equipment anywhere in sight. Even concrete is being mixed in a series of large tumblers on location, no modern cement trucks.

  “It’s what didn’t make any sense when you told me about the story Metz gave you. When labor is plentiful and cheap, why would you bring bulldozers and backhoes?” says Adam. “Besides, the government down here doesn’t favor it. You don’t get to depreciate your equipment in Mexico. You’re expected to hire your countrymen. Give them jobs. Did you notice the hotel staff last night?”

  “What about them?”

  “Veritable army,” says Adam. “It took three of them to lead each of us to our rooms, one to lead the way, one to carry our luggage, and one to follow along, I suppose to make sure we weren’t ambushed from behind. Mexico is learning how to avoid revolutions,” he says. “You have to admire them for the effort.”

  “You sound like you travel down here regularly.”

  “Enough. I like the people. Friendly. What you see is what you get.”

  “Then why all the security?” I ask.

  “I’m a humanitarian,” says Adam, “not a fool.” Something catches his eye. He leans forward and talks into Julio’s ear over the seat in front.

  When he settles back, he looks at me and points off to our left. “That’s Puerto Adventuras up ahead there. It’s a resort. Has a fleet of good fishing boats. Have you ever done any deep-sea sport fishing?”

  “No. I’ve had clients that are into it, though.”

  “You should try it sometime. We’re going to stop there on the way back for dinner. We may spend the night, depending on how late it is.”

  “I didn’t bring a change of clothes, toothbrush, or anything else.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll go native,” he says. “Besides, anything we need we can find there.”

  We pass several signs with the word Cenote, each of these listing kilometers. I ask Julio about these.

  He tells me that the Mayans considered them sacred watering holes. They worshiped at these caverns in the limestone under the jungle where large quantities of fresh water gathered, sometimes running in underground rivers.

  “There are many of them in the jungle down here. Some of the Indians take their water from them even today. You want to be careful, though,” he says. “Watch out for ah . . . how do you say? Caiman.”

  “Gators. Big ones,” says Herman. “What he’s tellin’ you is, you get off the road, you wanna watch where you take a drink.”

  I make a mental note, not that I’m planning on drinking anything that doesn’t come out of a sealed bottle.

  A few minutes farther up the road, and Julio is looking at a map spread open on his lap. He’s talking in Spanish into the handheld wireless again. “Aqui. No, no, no, no, aqui.”

  The lead car throws on its brakes and suddenly turns left across the highway without a signal. The car doing at least forty. We all follow, a Mexican intersection.

  We bounce along on a sand-strewn road into the strip of jungle between the highway and the coast, my body bucking in the seat belt. We travel for a few miles.

  As we approach a rise in the road, Julio issues orders for the cars to slow down. Finally we stop. He marks the place on the map with his finger and confers with Herman, who seems to agree. Then Julio gets out of the car and runs up to the lead vehicle. The man in the passenger seat of that car gets out, and the two of them take off up the road, on foot.

  They are gone for about five minutes, when I see Julio coming back toward us, a few steps and a skip as he hustles down the road. He finally reaches the car. Adam pushes the button, rolling down his window.

  “This es the place.” Julio is out of breath, perspiration running down his forehead and cheeks, dripping from his chin. “You will want to take a look.”

  Adam closes the window and gets out. He tells the driver to keep the motor running and the air-conditioning on.

  I climb out on the other side while Julio opens the back of the car and fishes around for something. He comes up with a bottle of water, takes a long drink. “Señor?” He offers it to me.

  I pass.

  Then he finds two pairs of field glasses, large Bausch & Lomb’s, twelve power, fifty millimeters. He hands one to me and the other to Adam, then leads us back up the road.

  It takes three or four minutes uphill and around a bend before we reach the crest where Julio’s helper is still standing, looking toward the sea in the distance. As we appr
oach, he’s crouching, blending into some low jungle foliage at the side of the road.

  He speaks to Julio in Spanish and holds up two fingers. He points off in the distance. “Dos hombres fuera de la casa.”

  Adam and I settle in next to them. I can see that from this point the jungle declines gently toward a cove and some rocky bluffs on the coast about a mile away. A little to the north, perhaps a half mile from where we stand, is a sizable clearing in the jungle, red clay and naked limestone scraped clean, like a bald spot in a sea of green. I would guess it is several acres in size. Parked on it is an assortment of trash, wrecked-out vehicles and abandoned tires, some larger trucks, old Fords and Chevys, one with a rusted crane on the back that looks like it could be an antique.

  The ground is spotted with empty fifty-gallon drums corroding in the sun, some of them dented and tipped on their sides. Splotches of darkness spread from the yawning open ends of these into the soil, the last contents leaking out onto the ground.

  On the far side, closest to the bluffs and the sea is a construction trailer, white sides and a flat metal roof with an air conditioner on it, ripples of heat rising from this.

  Out in front of the trailer, a few large truck tires laid on their sides with pieces of plywood thrown over them form a crude wooden deck in front of the door that faces this way.

  Julio finishes talking to his assistant, then swivels around on his haunches to translate for Adam and me.

  “This es a road they don’t use,” he says. “Otra. Over there.” He points. “The other road. They use.”

  I lift the field glasses to my eyes and adjust them. On the other side, farther to the north, a winding stretch of brownish red soil wends its way back into the jungle and disappears around a curve.

  “My man says two of them are outside the house. The trailer. They are armed.”

  I bring the glasses back to my eyes and check it out. I see nothing moving around the trailer. The cars parked closest to it appear to be empty. With the sun now behind us, anyone outside is likely to be around in back of the trailer, in the shade, where we can’t see them.

  “We’ll stay here for a few minutes,” says Adam. “It’s getting hot.” He takes off his hat, one of those floppy safari things with a broad canvas brim, then crunches it up and uses it to wipe his forehead.

  Julio hands him a bottle of water. Adam uncaps it, takes a drink, and immediately spits it out. “It’s hot,” he says.

  Julio shrugs as if to say, “That’s all I’ve got.”

  Adam pours the rest over the back of his head and lets it drip down onto the jungle vegetation at his feet, then opens the hat up and puts it back on his head.

  “There.”

  When I look, Julio is back over my shoulder.

  I bring the glasses back to my eyes and train them at the trailer. From the back side a man walks this way, what looks like a short assault rifle of some kind slung from one shoulder, muzzle pointed at the ground. Just as he rounds the corner on the front side of the trailer, the door opens and another man steps out onto the plywood step in front.

  I squint into the glasses to make him out. He turns his body away from me just as I focus, awkwardly closing the door with one hand. I notice there is no arm coming out of the other sleeve of his shirt.

  When he turns around again I realize why. His arm is bandaged up against his body, shoring up the broken ribs I gave Hector Saldado when I hit him with the tire iron.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Are you sure?” says Adam.

  “In the flesh,” I tell him. “I was watching the sharp edge of the razor most of the time, but I’m not likely to forget that face anytime soon.”

  Adam takes a look and I hand my field glasses to Julio, who focuses on him and watches, then hands the glasses back to me. “He lose an arm?” he says.

  “In a manner of speaking.” I watch as Saldado steps down from the plywood platform, wrestles a cigarette one-handed from a pack in his shirt pocket, then lights it with a lighter from that same pocket.

  Then he ambles to one of the vehicles out front, a large van with back doors open, and calls two of the guards to come over.

  He gives them directions, pointing inside the van. One of them gets in, while the other one, his rifle slung over his shoulder, tries to pull something out of the back. He’s not having an easy time.

  Saldado calls several more of them from behind the trailer. Six of them finally muscle the thing out of the van.

  “You see that?” says Adam.

  “Yeah.”

  Whatever it is, is about six or seven feet long, wrapped in a cotton bed sheet that has twine tied around it. The six men stagger under the load. They lift it up onto the platform in front of the trailer, and then through the door inside.

  “What do you think it is?” Adam lowers the glasses from his eyes and looks at me.

  “I don’t know.”

  A few seconds later, Saldado comes out of the trailer, gets in the van, and drives off, headed for the dirt road on the other side of the property.

  “Well we’ve confirmed one thing. The brothers were involved with your man, Espinoza,” says Adam.

  “I’d like to know what that thing was they were carrying.”

  “We could try and take a closer look.”

  “How?”

  Adam talks with Julio who in turn speaks in Spanish with the other man. He motions off toward the other road with his hand. When Julio comes back he says: “You can get much closer to the trailer from the other road. He says there are some larger windows in the back, a sliding door. They walked in yesterday, and with field glasses they could see people inside.”

  Adam thinks about it. “You want to try?”

  “Why not?”

  Fifteen minutes later we’ve collected ourselves, cooling down in the air-conditioned cars, back out on the highway. We backtrack less than a mile and turn off on another dirt track toward the sea. Julio says something into the handheld as we drive. A minute or so later, I look back through the rear window and realize that the other two cars in our caravan have suddenly disappeared.

  “Don’t worry,” says Adam. “Julio’s people know what they’re doing.”

  “Yeah, they be gettin’ the fuckin’ artillery out,” says Herman. “Case we get our asses caught.” Herman doesn’t like what we’re doing. “Ya want I get you the bullet-proof vest from the back,” he says. “Da one wit da bull’s-eye got all the holes in it.”

  “Herman, cut it out,” says Adam.

  “Yessir.” But when I look in the rearview mirror, Herman is still smiling, winks at me, chipped tooth looking like a broken picket on a fence.

  “It will be all right,” says Julio. “If they stop us, I will tell them that you want to talk business. That you are down here looking for property for a resort. I will also let them know that we have people out on the road,” he holds up the walkie-talkie, “other cars. They are not likely to do anything. They would have no way of knowing what they are confronting.”

  Adam smiles at me. “This is why you hire people.”

  The Surburban rumbles down the road, bouncing over washouts from the last hurricane. Suddenly Herman hits the brakes, skidding tires throwing up dust. He’s turning the wheel, trying desperately to avoid plowing into the pickup that is parked across the road. We end up off the side, with the nose of our car in the jungle undergrowth.

  “Man on the road,” says Herman. One hand is off the steering wheel; when it comes back up, it’s clutching Herman’s big stainless forty-five automatic.

  “Herman. Put the gun away,” says Adam. “Julio.”

  Without another word Julio is out of the car, slamming the door behind him, his hands out in front of him, showing anyone who is looking that they are empty. He holds them above his shoulders, spouting Spanish a mile a minute.

  The dust begins to settle and I see a man, faded running shoes, dark pants, and a yellow shirt. He is pointing a rifle at Julio’s chest. Another one pops out of th
e jungle on the other side of the road. When I turn, two more are coming out of the bushes right next to our car, one of them with an AK alternately pointing at my window and then sweeping the back of Herman’s head.

  Fortunately Herman has reholstered the forty-five, both hands now on the steering wheel.

  “Everybody stay cool,” says Adam.

  The conversation seems to go on for a long time. Julio with his hands up, the other guy with his rifle pointed. After what seems like an eternity, Julio makes a tentative move with one hand toward his belt. He reaches very slowly down and lifts his walkie-talkie out of its carrying case. He holds it up so the other guy can see that this is not a weapon, then talks into it, the other man watching and listening. Finally, the other man nods, waving the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of travel.

  Adam takes a deep breath. “Well at least it looks like they’re not going to shoot us here.”

  Julio comes back to the car and gets inside, his face shimmering with sweat. “It’s all right.” He is breathing heavily, wiping his face with a handkerchief from his pocket. “I have been told that we are to follow him.”

  The pickup pulls back and clears the road.

  Herman starts backing out of the bushes, tires sliding on green vegetation, pulls back onto the road, and drives past the truck.

  We slow down for a second, just long enough for another vehicle, a beat-up rusted-out Toyota pickup, to pull out in front. Two men are riding shotgun in the back, rifles laid across their laps pointed in our direction. They are sitting up on the side wall, one hand on the rifle’s grip, finger in the trigger well, while they hold on with the other hand and the truck bounces along the road.

  “What did he say?” says Adam.

  “Private property,” says Julio.

  “All that talk for two words?” says Herman.

  “Yeah, well. Next time you can do the talking.”

  “You did fine,” says Adam. “You kept us alive. Better than your friend pulling out his goddamned gun.” Adam pats Julio on the shoulder.